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STUDIA UBB PHILOLOGIA, LXII, 2, 2017, p.

43 - 52
(RECOMMENDED CITATION)
DOI:10.24193/subbphilo.2017.2.03

WORDS IN (EVERY)ONE’S MIND.


TIPS AND TRICKS ON ROMANIAN LEXIS ACQUISITION

DIANA V. BURLACU1

ABSTRACT. Words in (Every)one’s Mind. Tips and Tricks on Romanian Lexis


Acquisition. Words, be they viewed as separate entities, semantically related or
connected in utterances, represent the basis of a language and, extensively, of
communication. Due to the world knowledge we all share, to which several social
features are added, humans basically ‘speak’ the same ‘language’, assumed as a
series of common-sense (non-)verbal actions. It goes without saying that
communicators understand each other mostly by means of a common language;
once they intend to transfer their thoughts into a foreign language, overlapping,
misunderstandings or breaches of communication may occur. Such linguistic facts
represent the premise of the present study, which aims to survey certain
differences between native and non-native speakers, the focus being the Romanian
language (as a foreign language). A peculiar Balkan Romance language, with Slavic,
Greek and Turkish influences, the Romanian language has intrigued different
speakers from all over the world, both by its lexis and its grammar. Out of practical
considerations, merely the Romanian vocabulary is examined here, and particularly
the A1-A2 speakers (in accordance with the CEFR, The Common European
Framework for Languages) are addressed, since it is the beginners who typically
encounter many linguistic hardships. Certain pragmatic learning strategies
(validated through research and teaching experience) are collected in the study,
meant to represent a useful (yet not extensive) tool for anyone interested. Naturally,
relevant examples are provided, in a gradual approach from simple to complex,
such degrees encompassing phonetics, semantics and pragmatics.

Keywords: CEFR; communication; language; lexicology; learning strategy;


meaning; mental lexicon; Romanian vocabulary; semantics

REZUMAT. Cuvintele din mintea noastră. Strategii şi tehnici de achiziţie a


vocabularului limbii române. Cuvintele, indiferent dacă sunt privite ca unităţi

1 Diana-Viorela Burlacu, Ph.D, is a teaching assistant within the Department of Romanian Language,
Culture and Civilization, Faculty of Letters, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She has
been teaching EFL and RFL (Romanian as a foreign language) A1-B2-level courses to the
preparatory year students, various scholarship holders and to the International Summer Courses
of Romanian Language and Civilization students. Author of A Pragmatic Approach to Pinteresque
Drama (2011, Cluj-Napoca) and co-author of Antonime, Sinonime, Analogii (1st ed., 2011, Bucharest;
2nd ed., 2013, Cluj-Napoca). Her main areas of interest are: RFL/RSL, lexicology, semantics,
pragmatics, translations and interculturalism (dianav.burlacu@gmail.com).

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DIANA V. BURLACU

distincte, relaţionate paradigmatic sau sintagmatic, reprezintă structura de bază a


unei limbi, dar şi a comunicării, în general. Datorită cunoştinţelor despre lume pe
care fiecare le are, cărora li se adaugă diverse particularităţi sociale, oamenii
‘vorbesc’, de fapt, aceeaşi ‘limbă’, percepută ca o serie de acţiuni (non-)verbale, de
bun simţ. Este de la sine înţeles faptul că o limbă comună facilitează comunicarea;
odată ce se doreşte exprimarea într-o limbă străină, participanţii la procesul
comunicativ se pot confrunta cu diferite neajunsuri, cum ar fi suprapunerile
semantice, interpretările eronate sau chiar lipsa oricărei comunicări. Astfel de fapte
lingvistice constituie premisa lucrării de faţă, care îşi propune să abordeze
diferenţele dintre vorbitorii nativi şi cei nonnativi, cu referire la limba română (ca
limbă străină), singura limbă romanică din spaţiul balcanic, având influenţe slave,
greceşti şi turceşti, asemenea particularităţi lexicale şi gramaticale intrigând diferiţi
vorbitori din întreaga lume. Din considerente practice, doar lexicul limbii române
este supus examinării aici, îndeosebi primele niveluri de competenţă lingvistică, A1-
A2 (aşa cum se stipulează în CECR - Cadrul european comun de referinţă pentru
limbi), din moment ce începătorii se confruntă cu cele mai multe dificultăţi de ordin
lingvistic. Studiul de faţă oferă strategii practice de învăţare (validate prin studii de
specialitate, dar şi prin experienţa concretă de predare), constituindu-se, credem
noi, într-un instrument valoros (chiar dacă nu complet) pentru toţi cei interesaţi. În
plus, nu lipsesc exemple relevante ale observaţiilor teoretice, care pornesc de la
simplu la complex, acoperind nu doar fonetica, ci în special semantica şi pragmatica.

Cuvinte-cheie: CECR; comunicare; limbaj; lexicologie; strategii de învăţare;


sens; lexicon mental; limba română; vocabular; semantică

Motto:
Words are stitched together in one’s
mind like pieces on a patchwork quilt.
(Jean Aitchison)

Words are stitched together in one’s mind like pieces on a patchwork


quilt… No matter how clear-cut or inspiring such words are, “the whole
situation is more like badly spread bread and butter, with the butter heaped
up double in some places while leaving bare patches in others. Some words
overlap almost completely, as with chase and pursue, or plump and fat, while
elsewhere there are inexplicable gaps: there is no generally accepted term for
‘live-in lover’ or ‘dead plant’ ” (Aitchison 1996: 73). Such an argument even
lengthens in the case of acquiring a foreign language, since lexical or semantic
items, but also cultural concepts may not find their counterparts: “[l]anguages
rarely divide up the world in exactly the same way, and so we should not be
surprised if we find students using the word ‘cup’ to describe an object which
is in fact a ‘glass’, a ‘mug’ or even a ‘bowl’ (Gairns, Redman 1991: 13).
The key explanation lies in the so-called prototypes, which “represent the
mental models of the world we live in, models which are private and cultural

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WORDS IN (EVERY)ONE’S MIND. TIPS AND TRICKS ON ROMANIAN LEXIS ACQUISITION

architectures, and only partially in touch with ‘reality’. Such models are referred
to under various names: mental models, frames, scripts, internalized cognitive
models or ICMs, cognitive domains” (Aitchison 1996: 70). Hence, the fact that
certain students whose national or social backgrounds lack(ed) the cultural
element are unable to understand what statuie (statue), monument, teatru
(theatre), balet (ballet), even spectacol (show), orchestră (orchestra) and concert
mean, should not be viewed as shocking or incredible any more. They could
simply not relate such concepts to anything they knew or were exposed to.
If we are to differentiate between a first/native language (L1) and a second
or foreign language (L2), learning an L1 has been regarded as “imitation and
practice” (Lightbown and Spada 1993: 2) – the behaviourist view; as “innate
endowment/ Universal Grammar” (Lightbown and Spada 1993: 8) – the innatist
position; as well as “a result of the complex interplay between the uniquely human
characteristics of the child and the environment in which the child develops”
(Lightbown and Spada 1993: 14) – the interactionist view, the last of which seems
the most comprehensive.
In what concerns the second/foreign language acquisition, its success
highly depends on certain learner characteristics, such as:
 “knowledge of another language
 cognitive maturity
 metalinguistic awareness
 knowledge of the world
 nervousness about speaking” (Lightbown and Spada 1993: 21),
and learning conditions, namely:
 “freedom to be silent
 ample time
 corrective feedback: grammar and pronunciation
 corrective feedback: word choice
 modified input” (Lightbown and Spada 1993: 21).
The aforementioned ‘modified input’ refers to ‘motherese’ or caretaker
talk in L1, or foreigner talk/ teacher talk in L2, a rather artificial, yet
comprehensible and helpful style adjusted to the needs of the learners, by
deceleration, simplification, repetition and paraphrase. However, such a talk is
absent in the case of ‘language immersion’ or ‘street learning’ (Gairns, Redman
1991: 1), as different from school learning; still, the main features of such a bain
de langage are extremely valuable in the didactic-related context too.
Probably the ‘affective filter’, “an imaginary barrier which prevents
learners from using input which is available in the environment” (Lightbown
and Spada 1993: 28), should also be taken into consideration as another criterion
of learning a new language. Boredom can be eventually overpassed by the proper
activities, but the lack of motivation (be it personal or professional) or of aptitude
represent real hindrances in the acquisition process.

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DIANA V. BURLACU

A. Word-Choice in L2

In what regards vocabulary in general, its importance can be definitely


summed up by the following statement: “Without grammar very little can be
conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed” (Wilkins, in Thornbury
2005: 13), the lexical items actually forming the foundation of any language. Words
are basically approached from four interconnecting angles: meaning, pronunciation,
collocation and expressions – Gough 2002: 3 (set phrases or formulae, phrasal verbs,
idioms), the last two representing the language user’s ability to contextualise them.
In the process of learning a second/another language, a first crucial
problem is the L1-L2 overlapping, a trap that an A1 learner can hardly escape
from but, at the same time, a prop of the new language acquisition; the dual
situation is illustrated below, adapted to Romanian as a foreign language (RFL):

Table 1. Intralexical factors that affect vocabulary learning (Laufer, quoted in


Pavičić Takač 2008: 8)
Facilitating factors Difficulty-inducing factors Factors with no clear
effect
Familiar phonemes Presence of foreign phonemes (usu. ă, î, â, ş, ţ)
Phonotactic regularity Phonotactic irregularity
Fixed stress Variable stress and vowel change
Consistency of sound- Incongruency in sound-script relationship (elefant
script relationship - [e], este - [je]; a iubi - [ii], urşi - [i]; adj. deşi - [i],
conj. deşi - [ii])
Word length
Inflexional regularity Inflexional complexity (RFL)
Derivational regularity Derivational complexity (RFL)
Morphological Deceptive morphological transparency
transparency
Synformy (ex. brown has two lexical restrictions:
căprui (as of eyes), şaten (as of hair), and a third
general form, maro, for miscellaneous items.
Part of speech
Concreteness/
abstractness
Generality Specificity
Register neutrality Register restrictions
Idiomaticity
One form for one One form with several meanings
meaning

It should be stated from the very beginning that the size and the main
semantic spheres of a second-language speaker’s vocabulary vary, in accordance
with the learning settings (full or restricted exposure to/use of L2); age (children,
young learners or adults); areas of interest (general language or specific

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languages – medical, business, legal, etc.), to which several others may be added:
the L2- course duration; the speaker’s intelligence and talent for languages;
subjective word-selection (the so-called “vital personal relevance of an item” -
Gairns, Redman 1991: 65) and so on.
However, the essential criteria of word-choice and lexis acquisition in L2 are:
a. USEFULNESS: “If the student does not perceive the vocabulary input to
be useful it will be difficult to engage his interest” (Gairns, Redman
1991: 60);
b. FREQUENCY: the more recurrent a word is, the sooner it will be learned
and taught;
c. LEARNABILITY and
d. TEACHABILITY (in Thornbury 2005: 34-35).
While the last criterion refers to the easiness of lexical demonstration
or illustration, learnability is commonly associated with the contrastive analysis
hypothesis (CAH). According to it, “where there are similarities between the two
languages, the learner will acquire target language structures with ease; where
there are differences, the learner will have difficulty” (Lightbown and Spada
1993: 23). Consequently, the first L2 lexical items to be introduced should be
those sounding similar, thus familiar to the learners, but they ought to be
ratified by the criterion of frequency in all cases:
 arogant (Engl. arrogant, Fr. arrogant), before its synonyms,
îngâmfat/încrezut
 a combina (Engl. to combine, Fr. combiner), before its synonym, a potrivi
 a decide (Engl. to decide, Fr. décider), before its synonym, a hotărî
 inteligent (Engl. intelligent, Fr. intelligent), before its synonym, deştept
 similar (Engl. similar, Fr. similaire), before its synonym, asemănător
 *tomată (Engl. tomato, Fr. tomate), not applicable (not ratified by
frequency – such a specialised term is replaced by roşie).
However, “human mental dictionaries cannot be organized solely on
the basis of sounds or spelling. […] humans fairly often confuse words with
similar meanings” (Aitchison 1996: 11). Even if some A1-A2 speakers of RFL
still confuse mănuşă (Engl. glove) with mătuşă (Engl. aunt), a găti (Engl. to
cook) with a găsi (Engl. to find), rochie (Engl. dress) with roşie (Engl. tomato)
or a călări (Engl. to ride) with a călători (Engl. to travel), some others have
problems with the so-called ‘false friends’ - seemingly identical lexical items:
library and bookstore, respectively bibliotecă and librărie; advertisement (Rom.
reclamă), similar to avertisment (Engl. warning). Moreover, due to the mental
lexicon and the so-called interlanguage (Selinker, in Lightbown and Spada
1993: 55) – a more or less conscious blending of a speaker’s first and second
language characteristics, some would naturally say *a călări o bicicletă (Engl.
to ride a bike), instead of the correct variant a merge cu bicicleta or *Eu sunt 20 de
ani. (Engl. I am 20 years old.), instead of the correct variant Eu am 20 de ani.

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As a matter of fact, in the case of these false cognates, the “equivalence


hypothesis may fail and lead to erroneous conclusions because of the
following reasons (Swan, in Pavičić Takač 2008: 9):
 lexical units in two languages are not exact equivalents (i.e. there is
more than one translation);
 equivalent lexical units in related languages have different permissible
grammatical contexts;
 equivalents belong to different word classes;
 equivalents are false friends;
 there are no equivalents at all”.

B. RFL/RSL Learning/Teaching Strategies

As in the case of any L2 acquisition process, mainly viewed as


cognitive progression, RFL or RSL (Romanian as a second language) proves no
exception at all, making use of similar learning/teaching strategies, such as:
1. Word-translation (in the students’ mother tongue or in an intermediate/
contact language) – still the commonest learning strategy, but the last choice in a
modern language classroom – is the quickest, time-saving approach to grasp the
meaning of a word, yet rather often the least efficient. Such a contrastive method
usually impedes or slows the rapid access to acquiring both vocabulary and fluency.
1.1. Looking words up in a bilingual dictionary, a method frequently used
for self-study, not necessarily in the classroom; a more productive alternative,
especially for higher levels, would be the monolingual dictionary or the
thesaurus. For example, the English Vocabulary Profile (EVP), structured on the 6
levels of language knowledge stipulated by The Common European Framework of
Reference for Languages – CEFR, reveals some undoubtedly giant work behind the
A1-C2 word lists for the English language, a vital starting point in vocabulary
acquisition, language teaching and assessment, as well as text and manual
elaboration, to be found under the following link: http://vocabulary.
englishprofile.org/ dictionary//word-list/uk/a1_c2/A. In addition, certain words
are assigned various levels in accordance with their different meanings: “for
instance, the word degree is assigned level A2 for the sense TEMPERATURE, B1 for
QUALIFICATION, B2 for AMOUNT and C2 for the phrase a/some degree of (sth)”
(http://vocabulary. englishprofile.org/staticfiles/about.html). Unfortunately still
inexistent at the moment, a Romanian Vocabulary Profile would absolutely ease the
students’, teachers’ and manual authors’ tasks.
In Seashore and Eckerson’s classification, an average speaker should have
knowledge of: “common ‘basic words’ ” (in Aitchison 1996: 6) – a ‘core
vocabulary’ of approximately 2,000 words or at least 3,000 word families, as argued
in Thornbury 2005: 21; “rare ‘basic words’, and derivatives and compounds” (in
Aitchison 1996: 6). If applied to RFL, the noun pui (Engl. chicken) belongs to the

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first category, the second-person verb pui (Engl. you put) may be a rather rare
‘basic word’ for a non-native beginner (because of the frequent incorrect form
puni*), whereas pui de animal/ pasăre (Engl. the young of any animal or bird) and
pui de somn (Engl. nap) fit in the last category of compounds; in the CEFR
terminology, the above-mentioned item should range from A1, A1/A2 to B2 and
C1 (the idiomatic expression a trage un pui de somn – Engl. to take a nap).
2. The use of visuals for vocabulary acquisition, practice and revision:
“flashcards, photographs, blackboard drawings, wallcharts and realia (i.e.
objects themselves)” - Gairns, Redman 1991: 73, sometimes accompanied by
mime and gesture.
3. The use of non-visuals or verbal means for vocabulary acquisition,
practice and revision: “providing an example situation; giving several example
sentences; giving synonyms, antonyms, or superordinate terms; giving a full
definition” (Thornbury 2005: 81) or even providing a scenario on the target
word(s), although such a strategy may prove scarce in case of A1-level.
4. Vocabulary organisers – as an example, for the intermediate level and
above (A2+-C1), Chris Gough has proposed 100 topics for self-study, structured
into 17 sections, such as: people, describing people, feelings and emotions, the
human body, health, around the house, food and drink, leisure time, sport, the
media, technology, money matters, travel and transport, education and work,
society, our world and abstract concepts (time, numbers, size and shape,
quantities, etc.) – see Gough 2002: passim. A good hint at the end of each section is
the empty box for any personal words/expressions one may want to add.
Besides such topic-related items, ‘items grouped as an activity or process’
(the steps involved in buying a house, for example), Gairns and Redman (1991:
69-71) suggest lists of semantically similar and frequently confused lexemes;
pair-items (synonymy or antinomy); items within a scale (degree-differences);
word-families; discourse-markers; polysemy; ‘items causing particular difficulty
within one nationality group’: false cognates, phonological difficulties, etc.
Another valuable tool for the systematic increase of the lexicon is The
Words You Need (Rudzka et al, 1990), a series of miscellaneous texts from books,
magazines, newspapers or advertisements, also organised on common themes
and followed by discussions, word studies (including fine semantic delineations,
classified, explained and contextualised; synonymous pairs) and exercises.
5. The use of interactive worksheets/didactic films (focusing on
speaking and listening skills) for vocabulary acquisition, practice and revision;
valuable RFL/RSL materials ranging from A1 to B2 are available under:
http://video.elearning.ubbcluj.ro.
6. Reading in the target-language or listening to music/TV shows,
watching films. Even if such a learning strategy seems outlandish at A levels,
it is totally approachable if the story-lines or films are adapted to a beginner’s
level (see the link above, on the series of didactic videos, listening materials

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and exercises); higher-level speakers will naturally have no/fewer problems


with authentic texts and films.
7. ‘Playing’ or Five-minute activities – besides the more or less classical
activities, aiming to develop the linguistic and intercultural competences, Penny
Ur and Andrew Wright suggest various five-minute activities, mostly appealing to
our homo ludens side, thus applicable from the very first levels. A first plain
example could be Categories - listening comprehension of isolated words (Ur,
Wright 1993: 6): food and drink, animals/objects, big/small, round/square,
land/sea/air (Ur, Wright 1993: 7).
Even if illustrated for EFL/ESL, further activities for vocabulary
acquisition, review and enrichment, easily adaptable to RFL/RSL as well, are
to be found below, in two (interchangeable if adjusted to a more complex or
simple level) broad groups (our categorization):
7.1. Beginners or elementary (A1-A2; B1) students:
Making groups, Feel the object, Odd one out, Opposites, Likes and dislikes,
Favourite words, Simon says – “simple commands to perform” (Ur, Wright 1993:
27); Words beginning with…, Something interesting about myself – “volunteering
personal information” (Ur, Wright 1993: 77); Find someone who … – “brief pair
conversations” (Ur, Wright 1993: 76), How many things can you think of that …?, I
would like to be … , Compare yourselves/things (use of comparatives or opposites),
Crosswords (name learning, vocabulary review), Cutting down texts – “forming new
grammatical sentences by eliminating words/phrases from the original” (Ur, Wright
1993: 13) and Expanding texts; Piling up a sentence, Don’t say yes or no, English words
in our language, Hearing mistakes – “listening comprehension with quick reactions”
(Ur, Wright 1993: 34) or Mistakes in reading; Martian (explanations of everyday
objects, developing the paraphrastic competence), Questions about a statement,
Miming, Songs, Spelling bee; Who, where and what? – describing and guessing; Say
things about a picture, Slow reveal (of a picture), Sentence starters, Chain stories
(repeating the verbs/connectors), changing sentences/ Rub out and replace (“practice
of sentence patterns” – Ur, Wright 1993: 8, translated here into Romanian):
Noi deseori a mânca podea/parchet.
Oamenii niciodată a sta pe carne.
Copiii uneori a se juca cu scaune.
Câinii întotdeauna păpuşi.
de obicei ciocolată.
baloane.
7.2. Advanced (B1-B2, C1+) students:
Brainstorm round a word, with variations such as limited “free associations”
(Ur, Wright 1993: 5): adjectives or verbs that can apply to the noun; “a central
adjective can be associated with nouns” (Ur, Wright 1993: 5); prefixes or suffixes,
etc.; First, second, third; Damaged property (the central question: What might have

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happened? – using the past tense and passives) or What has just happened?;
discussion of Controversial statements (e.g. Boys and girls should have the same
education.) - (Ur, Wright 1993: 10), Five-minute writing storms (Ur, Wright 1993:
28), The other you, diaries, Expanding headlines, If I had a million dollars/ If I weren’t
here, Proverbs, Why have you got a monkey in your bag? – using one’s imagination.
Irrespective of the strategy preference, the teacher should be adaptable
and also able to involve the learners actively, encouraging them to speak in real-
life contexts, thus productively using their receptive vocabulary acquired in the
classroom. Even if the students will naturally favour certain activities, the four
competences (reading, listening, speaking and writing, to which two further
competences may be added: grammar and vocabulary and the cultural
competence) should always intertwine, similarly to everyday communication.
As a matter of fact, if native speakers are able to differentiate between
words and non-words, non-native speakers cannot, at least, not on an inferior level
of language knowledge. For such a reason, after gradually acquiring new items, the
non-native speakers should start using them in concrete situations and become
familiar to their meaning in the new language (the three English lexemes old –
young/new become vechi – nou (old – new) and bătrân – tânăr (old – young), whereas
a cânta includes both singing and playing an instrument), contexts of use, dynamism
(archaisms or words whose meaning has been updated) and connotations (a good
example is securitate/Securitate, the common noun security still being surpassed by
the Communism-associated body of control; actually, “the term connotation tends
to slip awkwardly between something like ‘peripheral meaning’ and ‘emotive
meaning’ and ‘personal associations’ ”(Yallop, in Halliday et al. 2004: 28).
Moreover, special focus should be given not only to individual or pair-
work/group activity, but also to contextual guesswork, by which the learners’
understanding is checked and also their cognition and attention are engaged.
Ultimately, it is the student who has to learn the vocabulary which, paradoxically,
“…cannot be taught. It can be presented, explained, included in all kinds of
activities, and experienced in all manner of associations” (Rivers, in Thornbury
2005: 144). The main idea underlining this statement is that one cannot learn
certain dictionaries or word-lists as such, but has to integrate the new lexical
items into their idiosyncratic mental lexicon; consequently, the resulted
vocabulary (in one’s mind) does not coincide with the initial vocabulary taught in
the classroom. In other words, “the relationship between a book dictionary and
the human mental lexicon may be somewhat like the link between a tourist
pamphlet advertising a seaside resort and the resort itself” (Aitchison 1996: 14).

C. Conclusions

In summary, words represent the basis of any language, any sequence


of communication and, extensively, of our humanity. Due to the multi-faceted

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character of vocabulary and its being taught/learned, some final observations


should be emphasised at this point:
 Even if languages share the same reality, each language is unique and creates a
specific linguistic realm; consequently, “words need to be presented in their
typical contexts, so that learners can get a feel for their meaning, their register,
their collocations, and their syntactic environments” (Thornbury 2005: 30).
 “Learners should aim to build a threshold vocabulary as quickly as possible”
(Thornbury 2005: 30), by various tasks, such as: “identifying, selecting,
matching, sorting, ranking and sequencing” (Thornbury 2005: 93-94).
 Words should be acquired gradually, from simple to complex, their
introduction in a syllabus or mental lexicon being ratified by four
criteria: usefulness, frequency, learnability and teachability.
 “Learners need multiple exposures to words and they need to retrieve
words from memory repeatedly” (Thornbury 2005: 30).
 The higher the language knowledge is, the fewer RFL/RSL tips and
tricks are needed.
To conclude with a financial comparison, words are like money – if we
always keep them in the ‘safe’ (be it a notebook or a dictionary) and never
‘invest’ them in concrete contexts of communication, such words are prone to
oblivion and thus prove entirely inefficient.

REFERENCES

Aitchison, Jean (1996). Words in the Mind. An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon.
Second Edition. Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell.
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***
http://www.englishprofile.org/wordlists, Copyright 2015 Cambridge University Press,
Updated: November 2016.
http://video.elearning.ubbcluj.ro, Copyright 2014-2015 Babeş-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca.

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